There was a time when the human figure nearly disappeared from American art, and in that time there was always Philip Pearlstein.

And now, through Feb. 1, the Montclair Art Museum has mounted the first retrospective of Pearlstein's work in a quarter century, including some 40 paintings and prints, beginning with a picture of a "Merry-Go-Round" he did in high school and ending with his late portraits. With, of course, the studio nudes he's famous for in the middle.

"I like making a revelation out of an artist you think you know," says Patterson Sims, the Montclair Museum's director and curator for this show. "I think we have more than a few revelations here, like the 'Superman' painting, begun in 1950 (and finished in 1952), before Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein were making Pop images; and the early landscapes, very juicily painted, which show his interest in Abstract Expressionism. And, of course, the later landscapes, of Jerusalem or New York City or Egypt, whatever, that show how devoted he is to precise observation...

"Philip told me, at one point, why he decided he didn't want to be an Abstract Expressionist -- because he didn't want to have a perpetual nervous breakdown. He wanted his art to be an orderly experience, for him as much as for the viewer."

And orderly it is, reduced, in Pearlstein's classic period, to classroom nudes arranged matter-of-factly amid a growing cast of thrift shop props (empire chairs, wooden lions, toy trains, hammocks, etc. Just see "Model with Neon Mickey and Bouncy Duck," finished in 2007. That Pearlstein could take both the oldest art subject and the most socially charged (nudity) and make it flat, neutral even, has a kind of dignity of purpose, a coolness of resolve, that has to be admired.

The early, life-long friendship with Warhol has always been part of the mystery of Pearlstein's art. The downtown diva and the committed classicist are supposed to be odd fellows. In fact, they met at Carnegie Mellon, and were close as students. Sims says the Warhols and the Pearlsteins were friendly in Pittsburgh, and Andy's brothers actually came to Pearlstein and asked him to watch out for Andy when they moved to New York City. They shared working class Pennsylvania backgrounds and apartments in New York for more than a year, and Warhol came to Pearlstein's wedding to Dorothy. Clearly there was more to the relationship than the one "Superman," which is now part of the Museum of Modern Art collection. Like the cookie jar fanatic Warhol, the Pearlsteins became inveterate collectors, not only of art but Americana of all sorts.

Maybe what they really had in common was a deadpan insistence on seeing the world they lived in. Sims says he titled this show "Objectifications" because Pearlstein told him that both he and Warhol had a way of making everything they painted into "objects."

About ten years ago Pearlstein, who was born in 1924, gave up his house on Fire Island, N.Y., (he still maintains a studio on 36th Street in Manhattan) and bought one out in Highland Lakes, Sussex County, where he likes to go kayaking. And there he's begun doing straight portraits of his neighbors (just giving the canvasses away to the sitters, often as not), rendered in the same fine, blonde light he uses for his nudes.

"Objectifications" is accompanied by a smaller show of objects gleaned from the Moses and Ida Soyer bequest, given to Montclair in 1974 by Moses Soyer, the well-known representative painter. Drawings, sculptures and paintings by Edward Hopper, Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood, Chaim Gross, and several others are arranged in the small reading room near the old main entrance, most of the art documenting the humanist concerns of the Depression era, when inspiring figuration was all the rage. You should take in all the hot little sketches hung in this room and cool them in the saucer of Pearlstein's formalism, just around the corner. Together they make a perfect Goldilocks of a show.